Tuesday, 28 June 2016

Barry Gardiner joins Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet

Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North, was reportedly booed by fellow Labour MPs yesterday evening when he had the temerity to speak up in defence of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Corbyn has now appointed him shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary.

Gardiner is my member of parliament and I have clashed with him many times, as well as agreed with him on some issues, such as the Prevent Strategy. I stood against him in the General Election before last as the Green Party candidate.

We share a concern about the environment and climate change and although our specific policies, not least on the major question of whether our current economic system based as it is on continuing economic growth is compatible with tackling climate change, may differ, I welcome his appointment as strengthening the Labour Party's approach to the issue.

This is what he had to say in a recently updated Huffington Politics LINK article that demonstrates his ability to analyse the political implications of resource competition.:

Exactly one week before the Queen’s Speech President Obama gave a
speech - not in London, but in New London, Connecticut - to the United
States Coast Guard Academy. He said: “I am here today to say that
climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an
immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will
impact how our military defends our country... And so we need to act -
and we need to act now.”

He said that climate change would shape how every one of America’s
services plan, operate, train, equip and protect their infrastructure,
because climate change poses risks to national security, resulting in
humanitarian crises, and “potentially increasing refugee flows and
exacerbating conflicts over basic resources like food and water.”

Last summer I
was critical in this House of the government’s decision not to provide
financial support to the Italian government’s coast guard operation to
rescue refugees from Libya. The Government’s responded to me then that
such rescue operations acted as a “pull factor” and were only increasing
the number of attempts. I thought it an obscene argument then and in
the intervening months we have seen that it was not only obscene, but
wrong. The numbers have increased. This Saturday the Italian Coast Guard
announced that more than 4,000 migrants had been rescued off Libya’s
coast in 22 separate operations in just one day.

We need to look
deeper into why those migrants are coming in the first place. It would
be convenient for me to point to the British and French air strikes, not
to mention the failure to prepare a post-Gadhafi strategy that left
that country in chaos. But I want to look deeper still into why the
civil war started in the first place. It was part of a much wider
pattern of regional upheavals that we called the Arab Spring that began
in Egypt in 2010 with the uprisings in Tahrir Square.

If we track back those disturbances we come inexorably to the 2010
drought in Russia’s wheatbelt. It was the longest and most severe
drought in Russia in over 50 years. The country lost 25% of its crop and
it led Russia to impose an export ban on wheat that it had
traditionally exported to Egypt. The food crisis in Egypt was the
pre-curser to the Arab Spring. It was the same in Tunisia and the rest
of the Arab world.

On the 9th
September 2010 when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned
that Syria’s drought was affecting food security and had pushed 2-3
million people into “extreme poverty” few people took any notice. In
fact Syria had suffered four successive years of drought: the longest
and deepest failure since records began in 1900. The losses from these
repeated droughts were particularly significant for the population in
the northeastern part of the country, in Al-Hasakeh, Deir Ezzor and
Al-Raqqa.

Small-scale
farmers were worst affected — many of them not able to cultivate enough
food or earn enough money to feed their families. Herders also lost
80-85 percent of their livestock. Thousands left the northeast and
migrated to informal camps close to Damascus. Experts warned at the
time, that the true figure of those living in “extreme poverty” was
higher than the official 2-3 million estimate. What is astonishing in
military terms is that nobody predicted in September 2010 that such a
tinder box might give rise to civil unrest and civil war only six months
later.

The
International Institute for Strategic Studies is very clear on the
impact of resource shortages. In 2011 they published a report claiming
that climate change “will increase the risks of resource shortages, mass
migration and civil conflict” and the MoD has said that it will shift
“the tipping point at which conflict occurs”.

The degradation
of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of
the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed. And what is perhaps
equally disturbing is that we are beginning to see evidence that efforts
to mitigate or adapt to climate change by some countries can actually
shift increased risk onto others.

Climate change
brings pressures that will influence resource competition between
nations and place additional burdens on economies, societies and
governance institutions around the globe. These effects are threat
multipliers. They will aggravate those things that lead to conflict:
poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social
tension. If Britain is to play a positive role in the world then this
must be understood by our military and we must adapt.

We as
politicians have to understand that the greatest threats to our security
are no longer conventional military ones. You cannot nuke a famine. You
cannot send battleships in to stop the destruction of a rainforest. But
you can spend money on clean technology transfer that enables countries
to bring their people out of poverty without polluting their future.
You can invest in adaptation measures that will protect communities from
the effects of climate change that are already placing their societies
under stress.

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